Monthly Archives: October 2011

Oct 31 2011

Advice to the Reader: NaNoWriMo

For those few out there that don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, it’s short for National Novel Writing Month.  Every year, the idea is that those who decide to participate are supposed to write a short novel of 50,000 words in the month of November.  It’s probably too late to get yourself in the right frame of mind, seeing as if you’re just finding out about this now, you’re supposed to start tomorrow.  Settling down to write 50k words in a month is a pretty daunting task.  I recommend everyone try it at least once.  Though I may be a bit of a hypocrite for saying so, seeing as I am a rather pathetic 0 for 1 in my attempts.

I have only tried it once, last year.  I wrote about 1500 words the first day, and then my boss mysteriously disappeared for the 2nd and 3rd.  He showed back up on the 4th, after a 48 hour drinking and gambling bender.  The owner gave him the 4th & 5th off so he could get his head back on straight.  During those four days, I worked roughly 45 hours.  The business was just starting, so I ended up working every single day in the month of November for at least 7 hours, though most days I worked 8-9.  It took me few days to recover from my boss’s disappearance and the next thing I knew it was the 9th of November and I fell asleep in my chair as I tried to sit down for my second writing session.  Needless to say, it was a bad year to try NaNoWriMo, and I didn’t even hit 5k much less 50k.

I wanted to try it again this year, but it is going to be another bad year.  I gave a four week notice to that same job.  I’m not leaving the company, but I am switching to two days a week, so I’ll have to, very soon, train my replacement.  My part-timer status won’t begin until after Thanksgiving.  The job is not as busy as it was last year, I am at least getting days off, but I am not in a position to take the time to write 50k words.  I have a few other goals for the month of November, not the least of which is getting Dim Speak on the market at Smashwords and Amazon.  I’ll post about those goals very soon.

Next year!  I am declaring that nothing will stand in my way next year.

Oct 26 2011

Someone Should Make This Go Viral

I don’t watch a lot of Youtube.  I find it to be a time sink, so I avoid it much like I avoid television by not owning a TV.  Anyway, I found this video through one of the podcasts I listen to and thought it was just too cool to not pass on.  Mucho thanks to Danny Tieger for making such a scientifically classy tune.

Oct 24 2011

Advice to the Reader: Just Stop Reading

Just stop reading might sound like odd advice for a reader to accept, but like most advice, it is contextual.  I’ve been thinking about a comment I made in my last post, do people who get things at the dollar store complain about the product?  Or even more germane with reading, why would someone complain about a novel that only cost them a dollar?

I’m not sure I have an answer for that.  I suspect it has to do with investment.  When someone reads a novel they not only pay the cost of the book, they invest 6-36 hours of reading time.  (That time window is more or less randomly chosen to reflect different book lengths and different speed readers.  I tend to read a little slow, which is why I don’t mind audio books.)  To quote a number of bloggers, I have no idea who coined the phrase first, Time is the Currency of Life.  Spend it wisely.

If you’re like me and my friends, you’ve said or have heard someone say something to the effect of:  “XXXX was terrible.  I wish I could get that two hours back!”  I can understand this.  I’ve said it myself.  I think a lot of people don’t value their time highly enough.  For instance, I haven’t changed the oil in my car for almost 20 years.  I did it myself throughout my teens and then one day I realized it takes me a little more than an hour to do it myself, not to mention the time it takes to go to the store and get the filter and oil, which still costs me about $8.  Two hours and $8 invested when I could have simply gone to Jiffy Lube or some equivalent and had the job done for $25 (or less with coupon) in fifteen minutes.  So if I valued my time at about $9 an hour, I was breaking even.

Sorry for the math lesson, but I quickly realized I’d rather have the hour and forty-five minutes than the extra $17 bucks, because aside from all the math, there was the “hassle factor”.  The hassle of dragging out the ramps and tools and crap versus sitting in an office reading a book or some other leisure activity.

Nice segue, now we’re back to talking about reading.  You buy someone’s book on Amazon for a dollar.  Your investment into this endeavor is pretty much all time.  A dollar for a book means you can probably pay for it with money found in the couch cushions.  From saving the change for two or three days after paying for your morning coffee. You can get a dollar by putting on grubby clothes, standing on the corner for fifteen minutes, and say, “Spare change.  I gotta read.”  Though in that scenario we get back to what is your time really worth.

The point I’m driving at is simple.  Please don’t harass the author for wasting your time.  If you get to a certain point and decide you’re not enjoying a “dollar dreadful”.  STOP READING!  Don’t punish yourself.  Don’t blame the author.  You’re not going to enjoy all books anymore than an author is going to please all readers.  If you’re not enjoying a book, put the Kindle down.  You are wasting your own precious resource, not the author.  There are far too many one dollar books out there for you to be wasting your time with the bad ones.

If you feel the need to waste even more of your time, go to Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes & Noble, etc. and give the author a bad review.  With one caveat, honesty is the best policy.  If you couldn’t finish the novel, make sure you say that in the review.  Please don’t represent yourself as someone who has full knowledge of the novel.

Oct 21 2011

I Have Arrived!

I have officially arrived on the blogging scene!

I’ve been checking my spam filter, which I will give wordpress.com kudos for its accuracy, and with that filter I have finally broken the 100 blocked spam milestone.  Yeah, that’s right.  As of today, the filter has blocked 101 spam messages from appearing on the blog.  That means more than 100 times someone (or more likely, some bot) has tried to post a message and they were denied!  62 of them this month alone.

Can you dig it?

Yeah!  Now my blog’s important!  I’m up there!

Speaking of the blog, as I have been floundering around trying to garner an identity for this place, I have been slowly coming up with more and more ideas as to how I’m going to build my “platform”.  You know, that “idea/identity” I use to build an audience and then in turn try to market my stories to.  Yeah, that platform.

Sorry, I get cynical about these things.  I guess it’s because I’m a lousy salesman.  I feel weird trying to gather up an audience and saying, “Hey!  Maybe you’ll like this or that info.  And, by the way, this is totally unrelated, but now that you know I’m not such a bad guy, buy my ebook!  When it comes out, it’ll only be 99 cents.”

Okay, I can’t argue with the price.  It’s tough to beat something that costs a dollar.  I can’t see anyone complaining about a 99 cent book, but I guess some do.  Do these same people complain about stuff they get at the dollar store?  I wonder.

Oct 19 2011

Book Cover Update

I have been conversing with an artist the last couple of weeks about the cover of my up coming novel Dim Speak.  She has already sent in a first draft, first print?  I’m not sure what the equivalent artistic vernacular would be.  I am well pleased with this version, but as with anyone with a vision that has someone else interpret it, I made a couple of small suggestions/requests.  I am confident it will effectively portray the tone of the novel once finished.

Speaking of which I have been giving a lot of thought about what Dim speak is in terms of genre.  I can’t really think of anything except straight fantasy.  I guess some would call it High Fantasy since it takes place over the course of three different worlds, but High Fantasy is also called Epic Fantasy and I wouldn’t describe this novel as what I would envision as Epic Fantasy.  I’ve already complained on this blog that I find Epic Fantasy much too verbose for my tastes.  At its core, my book is a “buddy novel” between a young man and an Angel, so I don’t waste a lot of time in the story waxing poetic about the environs and stick with the dynamics of the two main characters and their relationship.

If I had to create my own fantasy sub-genre, I suppose it is more “Blue Collar Fantasy”.  There is no epic quest.  The fate of two species does wind up in the hands of the protagonist, but that’s toward the end of the story and not why he sets off on his adventure in the first place.  It is more of a happenstance of being in the right place at the right time at the beginning of the story.  Who knows, maybe I can create my own sub-genre.

Oct 16 2011

Part Three: Advice to the Reader – Value Your Writer

I assume if you’re reading this post you’ve read the previous two, if not, you may want to check out Part One and Part Two, or else some of the comments in this post won’t make any sense.

The goal of this post is to use the ideas from the previous two, to give some useful advice to the reader.  I admit this post will likely sound a little self serving, but I promise that’s just a byproduct of venue.  Someone needs to say these things.  I guess, I’m just amongst the first.

So what does a reader want from a writer they love?

Obviously, they want the writer to write more stuff.  Most writers have day jobs.  Writing is just a part-time thing.  You want to help a writer you like, help them make enough so that writing can become their day job.

What about Stephen King, you ask?  This advice doesn’t apply to the uber successful authors.  Just the regular authors.  Trust me, there’s nothing you’re going to do to significantly impact Stephen King’s sales, and thus, nothing your dollars can do to get him to put out more content.  You’ll just have to wait like everyone else.

So how can I help a typical writer?

By adding value to that writer.

Just like an MLM, there are two ways you can create value for the writer.  First you can give them pennies by buying their books.  Even though I am wording it like that, I don’t want to make it sound like the buying of books isn’t important.  I’m simply referencing the previous post while pointing out that it is not the most important way to increase the value of a writer.

The most important way to help a writer, increase their value through the link economy.  By that, I don’t mean start a website and post a link to amazon in an attempt to get people to buy the writer’s work through your own affiliate program.  Though that does seem mutually beneficial for both the reader and the writer, so go ahead if it tickles you.

These days, most authors have websites and blogs as the foundation of their content.  You can create value for their content by creating links to that content.  Not only does this create avenues for others to discover and follow the author’s work, the links improve the author’s Google rating, which can be equally important.

Do you go to Smashwords, GoodReads, and Amazon to post comments and reviews of the authors work?

If not, that’s where you should start.  I’ll talk more about that another time.  If so, thanks for that.  It’s a great start (and an important battle).  But you can also mention them in reviews to similar books.  Why leave recommendations up to GoodReads and Amazon, when you can do it too?  A fellow reader would rather take your recommendation over that of a computer algorithm, I promise.

If a favorite writer blogs something interesting or important to you, you can help them by
tweeting their post.  If you can link a popular website or blog to your author’s content this is just like creating a distribution network for the author.  The incoming links to that popular site act like a friend of a friend to your author.

The link economy is still new, go out and be more creative than me with your linking.  With one caveat.  One thing Mr. Jarvis didn’t mention about the link economy
is that it is supported by one premise:  Good will.  In short, you must create links in an appropriate context, in a place where people can be reasonably expected to want such information.  Spamming links in places where they don’t belong will only damage your credibility, and worse, it will reflect poorly on the author you want people to
respect.

So that’s my advice.  If you want a writer to write more, you need to put them into a position where they are financially able to focus on just their writing.  The best thing you can do to support them, is by creating value for that writer.

Oct 14 2011

Part Two: Multi-Level Marketing (Scams)

If you didn’t read Part One: The Link Economy, you may want to do that.  Though, nothing in that post is required reading for this post.

I think most adults get approached to “take part in an exciting opportunity” at some point or other in their adult lives.  I also think that most of us are so apathetic toward going the extra mile, this actually protects us from these scams.  Maybe that’s too cynical.  Maybe people just hear something that’s too good to be true and simply start tuning it out.  I like the sounds of that better.  I’ll go with that explanation.

What opportunities are these people talking about?  They’re talking about Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) distributorships.  Also called Network Marketing, Referral Marketing, Pyramid Scamming,…  Oh wait, they don’t call it that.  That’s just what it is.

An MLM has two branches of attack.  First, you are expected to go out and sell products. Second, you go out and find other people to sell the same products. For your recruiting efforts, you then get a piece of their action. Just as the person who recruited you gets a piece of your action.

In almost every type of MLM, a person can make a few pennies by selling products, but the real money is made by recruiting an army to do the selling for you. A patsy is brought in with promises of big bucks by simply recruiting ten or twenty friends, who then go out and get their friends, and so on.  The patsy will eventually earn percentages of everyone in their downline distribution network, often 4-6 levels deep.  (Hence the
name Multi-Level.)  Then the patsy can retire to easy street, without doing any work at all.

The lawful definition between illegal pyramid scheme and legal multi-level marketing
network is pretty fine.  But as far as I am concerned, they are all scams quite simply because the numbers don’t add up, and thus, the promises of riches are impossible.

How large of a town do you live in?  Got the number in mind?  Okay set it aside for a second.

Suppose you actually do go out and recruit 10 friends.  How many in your network?  Answer:  11.  You plus the ten friends.

Now suppose they each actually manage to go out and get ten friends.  How many in your network?  Answer:  111.  You plus the ten friends and their one hundred friends.

You can guess the next supposition and answer.  The hundred friends get their ten and we now have a network of 1111 people.  This is only three levels deep.  I live in a podunk little town, where there are only 1200 living in the town and less than 9000 in the whole county.  Going three levels deep, I’d have to recruit the entire town, leaving almost no one to sell to, and their aren’t enough people in the county to go four levels
deep.

Do you live in a more urban area.  Got lots more suckers to join you?  How large was that town of yours?  Maybe you live in New York City.  The most populous city in the U.S. at just over 8 million people.  At least now you can go six levels deep.  That’s a network of 1,111,111 people. And fortunately, you still have 6.9 million people you can still sell to. Good luck!

As I said above, most people are pretty apathetic about joining in on such schemes, so what are the odds that you’re going to be living on easy street?  I’m not even going to waste my time calculating them.

So why are MLMs legal?  Like much that’s political, legality can be bought.  There are
thousands of companies running MLMs and they have the money to lobby for legislation that they can skirt around.  Take Amway as the perfect example.  It is the longest running MLM in the country.  They donate millions of dollars to politicians just so they can keep the scam alive.

Feel free to take this as a warning against getting yourself scammed in an MLM, but I’m going to use the same ideas in my third post to tell you how you can help writers you enjoy reading.

Oct 11 2011

Part One: The Link Economy

I have an idea for a three post series. I’ll put the ideas of the first two together in the third post so the reader will be able to see how these concepts benefit themselves as well as the writers they read.

This first post is about a concept that technology writer/blogger/journalist Jeff Jarvis came up with back in 2008. Like most people who makes their living by writing he has to wear many hats. Yes, it’s true. Most writers don’t sit around writing books for a living, they do a number of things that involve writing in hopes of making enough so they don’t starve to death. Speaking of books, he wrote, What Would Google Do?

In the traditional content economy, we create something and sell it over and over, and that’s how we get value.  Mr. Jarvis’ essentially observed that the internet is changing
the world from a content economy to a link economy, in that a person’s content has no value until other sites link to it.  It’s important to note that content still has value, but to paraphrase his comment in the following video, if a tree falls in the forest and no one’s there to see it, does it really matter that it’s fallen?

Too abstract?  Need and example?

Take this blog post.  Mr. Jarvis’ idea was meaningless until you learned about it from my comments and clarified by the links above to his blog post and to the video.  Presumably, you would never have known about the link economy had I not mentioned it here.  Now that you know about his ideas, maybe you think he’s a smart guy and decide to go buy his book.  Thus, my link has created value for him.  You bought his book.  His example in the video, suggested he put ads on his website.  Also another revenue stream that would create value for him.

He also mentions in the video about ways to kick back to those who create the value by
linking to his work.  Just to prove the point, I actually went to Amazon and signed up for their affiliate program, so that if anyone uses the above link to buy Mr. Jarvis’ book, then I’ll get something like 4% of the sale.  Or maybe 15%.  I don’t know.  I didn’t really
pay attention, because I don’t expect anyone to use the link.

Now you say, “Aha!  So this link economy doesn’t work in practice!”

Well, I’m sure it does, but I’m not looking to pimp my site that way.  I’m not looking to
make money by selling you other people’s books.  I’m hoping that you’ll buy mine once it comes out.  At the moment, I’m still working on building up the stuff I discuss in Part Two.

Oct 7 2011

Advice to the Reader: No Placebo Effect For Cancer

I have decided to make this advice to the reader thing a weekly post.  I have been making the post on Sundays, but Steve Jobs passed away yesterday and I felt compelled to say a little something about him, and hopefully use his passing as a warning to my readers.  A warning that is completely unrelated to writing and reading.

First off, I am not an Apple Fan Boy.  If anything, I am a Windows Fan Boy.  I don’t care for Apple’s closed architecture.  I generally prefer being able to mess around under the hood of my computer products, and that is one thing Apple products won’t let you do.  By the same token, I don’t begrudge Apple and their market share.  I’m glad they release such simple products so my family members can get online from time to time.

Second, even though I aspire to be a Sci-Fi/Fantasy writer, I do have training as a mathematician and a scientist.  Sadly, even people who manage to get their PhD’s often don’t get proper training as scientists, so don’t feel that just because someone went to school long enough to earn one, they must know how the scientific method works.

Third:  Sadly, in a capitalist society, you should always be skeptical of claims made by so-called scientists or in the context of this post, health practitioners.  Unfortunately, their goal may not be your best interests.  I know it is a lot of work, but for important matters, especially when your health is involved, you should hear arguments from all sides of whatever topic is under discussion and weigh the evidence appropriately.

Now that I have that long set-up out of the way, what is it I am going to talk about?  Well, it is something I would talk about to my statistics students when I used to teach (naturally in the context of statistics which I won’t do here).  Alas, when speaking of health matters to 18-21 year old college students, you are generally wasting your breath.  They are still indestructible and will live forever.  Nevertheless, I gave it my best shot.

Cancer is a fickle beast and we speak about it as though it were one disease that can attack different parts of the body.  The reality is that it is a classification of diseases.  There are many types of cancer.  Some have proven to be more treatable than others and over the last hundred years, science has made little baby step after little baby step towards various methods of attacking the cancer.  I said I wasn’t going to get into the statistics, but when it comes to cancer cures, they generally read something like:  XX% of people will live ten years or more after such and such treatments.  YY% will live 20 years, and so on.

Unfortunately, this is not the sort of thing people like to hear.  It’s not what Steve Jobs wanted to hear.  Rather than treating his pancreatic cancer with modern medicine, he listened to an alternative medicine promoter, Dr. Dean Ornish, who convinced him that he could treat his cancer with a vegetarian diet.  Now, there is nothing wrong with a vegetarian diet for healthy people, but it is not going to cure your cancer.  There is no scientific evidence that diet will cure any form of cancer.  Please read those words again:  There is no scientific evidence that diet will cure any form of cancer.

Alas, there are all kinds of so called alternative medicines out there.  Many of them even openly state that they rely on the “placebo effect” as part of the cure.  Unfortunately, many people misunderstand the placebo effect.  First, like cancer, there are numerous forms of the placebo effect.  Second, a placebo effect generally relies on focusing the mind on something else while the body figures out its own cure.  That’s why there is no placebo effect for cancer.

Cancer, in a simple nut shell, are cells from your own body growing out of control.  This can happen in different ways, hence different forms of cancer.  Your body doesn’t generally view itself as an invader, and that’s why the immune system doesn’t attack the cancer.  Focusing the mind on something else, i.e. triggering some sort of placebo effect, is not going to change the fact that your body isn’t going to attack something it views to be a part of itself.  You have to be, must be, proactive in your cancer treatments.

Steve jobs found his pancreatic cancer early.  Apparently, his odds were good at that stage of living 10 years or more, if he started treatment right away.  After trying for nine months to cure the cancer with a special diet and finally figuring out that it wasn’t going to help, his chances plummeted and as we can see, he didn’t even last close to ten years.  I agree this is all a “statistic thing” and there is no guarantee he would be alive now had he gone through the recommended scientific based treatments, but his odds were definitely better.  In terms of cancer, that’s all we can ask.

So what’s my advice to the reader?  When it comes to your health.  Get as much information as possible.  If something sounds too easy, or too good to be true, it probably is.  We all live by that sort of maxim when it comes to business.  Why would you abandon such sound advice when it comes to your life?

Oct 5 2011

Book Cover

Still haven’t gone in search of an artist for a book cover.  I’m kind of dreading this.  I suspect I’ll find this to be the worst part of self publishing.  I think it’s because I’m such a lousy artist myself.  I can draw poor stick figures, but I don’t think something like that would pass the muster in terms of attracting positive attention to my novel.  All the same, I fear that I’ll be willing to accept anything because I’m such a poor artist.

I would be willing to wager that a fantasy cover is the hardest or generally most expensive kind to procure.  In most genres, you can take photos and free clip art from a number of sites and mock up a cover.  Fantasy covers on the other hand tend to be drawn, and not usually cartoonish either.  They tend to be well drawn artwork.  The kind of artwork that an artist would expect to be paid for and deservedly so.

I have “Mark’s List” from Smashwords.  This is a list of people who have volunteered cheap service rates for Smashwords authors.  I guess I’ll find out soon enough how difficult finding a fantasy cover really is.